I created an embedded Linux distribution from scratch. It fits on a single floppy diskette. At the time of writing it uses ~1MB of storage. This gives

Floppinux - An Embedded 🐧Linux on a Single 💾Floppy

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2021-05-22 16:00:06

I created an embedded Linux distribution from scratch. It fits on a single floppy diskette. At the time of writing it uses ~1MB of storage. This gives me ~400KB free space to use on any custom software.

This distribution can boot on 486DX PC with 24 MB of ram (did not boot with less using QEMU). On an emulator it boots almost instantly. On bare metal modern hardware the only thing that prevent those speeds is the actual speed of a floppy drive. The maximum raw speed is 125KB/s. In reality it is even slower. I did not test on real 486 yet as I do not have one but I saw others done similar things and it took around 1 minute. To be fair most of that time was that data loading from the drive.

When I started this project I did a lot of research and to my surprise there was not a single good tutorial. Or I can not find it. There are a lot of instructions how to make some aspects but mostly redundant, old or oversimplified. And when I tried to combine this knowledge I hit many walls. This forced me to do even more research. In the end I learned a lot and manage to meed all my needs.

My first application I want to run will be Nomad Diskmag. An old-school magazine I'm creating. For a PC I made a nice Python GUI using PyGame. For this embedded project I will change the front-end to the bash script. Articles on both versions are plain .txt files. All I need is to present cover, table of content and then cat body of each file (using less for pages).